Claim consistency checking using soft logic

Journal Article

2020

Claim consistency checking using soft logi

Increasing concerns about the prevalence of false information and fake news has led to calls for automated fact-checking systems that are capable of verifying the truthfulness of statements, especially on the internet. Most previous automated fact-checking systems have focused on the use of grammar rules only for determining the properties of the language used in statements. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach to the fact-checking of natural language text, which uses a combination of all the following techniques: knowledge extraction to establish a knowledge base, logical inference for fact-checking of claims not explicitly mentioned in the text through the verification of the consistency of a set of beliefs with established trusted knowledge, and a re-querying approach that enables continuous learning. The approach that is presented here addresses the limitations of existing automated fact-checking systems via this novel procedure. This procedure is as follows: the approach investigates the consistency of presented facts or claims while using probabilistic soft logic and a Knowledge Base, which is continuously updated through continuous learning strategies. We demonstrate this approach by focusing on the task of checking facts about family-tree relationships against a corpus of web resources concerned with the UK Royal Family.

• Publication Work Type: PhD
• Publisher Name: Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction
• Volume Number: vol. 2,no. 3
• Pages: 147-171